London, England, &c

Updated 28JAN2000 : Initial impressions and stuff
Updated 11FEB2000 : Most of the stuff

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I'm not going to bother making a separate section for the other cities I went to and the rest of England ... especially in regional transport hubs like Reading, all the streets felt the same and all the towns have now melged into one amorphous experience. The only thing that changes is the regional distribution of newspapers, Radio Times and the TV magazine-programmes; the only thing that's stood out for me is the amount of begging going on in Oxford. Otherwise, think of the subrurban towns and high streets in London just like the "country" towns in England. (Except that the London high streets always have a tube station every 2 blocks ... and the buses in the country towns, even the double-decker ones, only have one door ... hello?!)

In fact, I kind of doubt there is any real "country" like Australia. You have bugger-all chance of getting lost beyond the reach of humanity, and before you know it you'll come across a walking track, a motorway, or both. You know, it probably really is just fine to take your tin-pot two-door towncar for a "country" drive in England (since you can't actually drive all day and night, unless you catch a ferry or something), unlike in Australia we're you'd be crazy to leave town without something reliable!! In case you ever break down, you really have to be prepared!

| Weather | Town | Tube | Cars | TV | Newspapers | Food | Music

Big Mac Meal Index

Sydney Big Mac Meal (medium)	In UK Pounds	London Big Mac Meal	Including tax	Cost of Living vs Sydney
$4.55	£1.82	£2.99	17.5% (included)	65% higher

 
Before I get started, just let me have a whinge about the weather here ... it's not much of a whinge, actually (considering what Sydney's been going through in the last few weeks); but who were all these people warning me about the cold, cold weather?! It's positively balmy (barmy?) here! I am seriously overpacked, and at times, overdressed. (The big danger is the complacency this can cause ... plus, the fact that so many people turn their central heating right up! Must be the same crowd who think the Millenium Dome is cold). I expected that changing hemispheres in mid-season would cause problems -- but L.A. is bugger-all different to Sydney, especially considering how mild Sydney was in December -- so then I prepared for another cold transition when changing to the east-coast US -- and yes, okay, there was snow, thankyou -- but that was more fun than annoying (for me, I suppose!) since the wind was so low and the snow was just drifting to the ground like crazy ... I'm not complaining. Next I go to Washington, which was milder again, no snow. So then I go to London, which is much further north than even Boston, and it's been mild all this time! (The taxicab drivers have informed me that this has been a funny winter). There was snow on December 15 but no sign since, barring a bit of sleet once and some frost. Finally I expected Cambridge or Oxford (or Exeter) to provide some colder whether, but it just wasn't to be. Most of the time you could get away with clothing you'd expect on a "wintery" or "cold" day in Sydney (when, I suppose, you could expect the locals to whinge about it).

The big problem is, if you're one of those luke-warm blooded little people who need to wear gloves outdoors, you can get all rugged up and fine, but when you walk inside somewhere (like some shops on Oxford Circus) and you have to strip right down. Otherwise, you'll become overheated and when you go straight out again your system will be so shut-down that you can't warm up again! I think, this is one of those climactic problems that Australians never encounter. (Elizabeth says, though, that she might getting used to it over time).

So next week I might go oop narth just to find out for sure. They got snow in Scotland on Saturday the 12th. But anyway, what's London like?

• Looking out my window on the West End, the people look giant. How the hell? It's because the streets and houses (and the cars, too) are all in proportion but all smaller.
• The town is very active at night, compared to the other places I've been so far. It's such a relief to see all the activity around Trafalgar Square in the middle of the night. (Except that the tube shuts down around midnight).
• Something else unique about the streets ... Elizabeth noticed it first ... no awnings. It makes the whole place friendlier for the pedestrian; think about it -- no signs blocking the sky to compete for your view to advertise.
• The road signage and markings ... while a little bit imperfect, is at least minimalised, which makes it more pleasing. The traffic lights are simply black all over, and there is really a complete lack of the words-words-words you'll see in a Sydney street, the information overload you'll get about parking restrictions, turning instructions and so on. What they do when they do have to have a sign, is make it a minimalist symbol only. (Like the well-known street names, either at knee-height or stuck to a building). There's really refreshingly little to read out there, except painted just off the kerb where it tells all the Americans/Europeans to "<-- LOOK LEFT" or "LOOK RIGHT -->".
  
  Basically, everything seems to be done with the use of the magical blue arrow (you may know it from the Keep Left signs that are newer):
  • If it points left, it means you must turn left (at a roundabout, maybe);
  • if it points right, it means you're probably entering a one-way street that goes to your right;
  • if it points down-and-left, that means Keep Left;
  • if it points down-and-right, that means don't go too close to this kerb;
  • if it points up, it means you are probably in a one-way street (the opposing traffic may later be symbolised by the use of the rare red arrow!), or, you cannot turn at this intersection and must go straight ahead;
  • if it's all lit up at a traffic light, it probably means that you'll have to go that direction when the light goes green -- in fact, the green light will be the same arrow
  • actually, watch for that arrow when it's green-on-black, because it's probably that rare beast, the green right-hand-turn! You'll usually find it underneath another green light, if you ever do, but not in a set of 2x3 lights like they do in Australia.
  
  So, the only words you'll actually find around the place are probably tube station names. Probably the only side-effect I don't like is the double-yellow lines painted on the gutter, which I think are overkill. They also tend to double-up on the give-way road markers for no good reason, which may sort of prompt you to stop the car and look, move on and do it again. Oh yeah, and they love using that painted triangle which (once upon a time) marked a fake traffic island, to encourage the left-turning traffic to veer left and right-turning traffic to veer right ... now it's just a psychological traffic calming device, which is painted ridiculously small in places where there's obviously only lane and you're never going to pull over to either kerb anyway. They even do it to the bicycles on the tiny little bike lanes!
• On the subject, it's nice to see some degree of support for bicyclists -- they even get their own green traffic lights in places (the same little bike symbol on the light as you get on the continent), and they get bike lanes in many places, for instance in Hammersmith's high street they can go up the one-way street the wrong way because the only lane travelling the other way is a bike lane separated by a nice fat median strip. Bikes and buses often get their own "red lane" here.
• The overall impression is neat & tidy. This really is a case where every nook and cranny has been attended to, simply due to sheer necessity. Even the fast food joints have a classy feel to them, with a bit more care taken than you get in Australia -- for example, the Pizza Hut restaurants are actually not suffering from neglect here; and you seem to get much more seating room and McDonald's and KFC, every McDonald's usually having a downstairs or upstairs overflow area. (Then there's the Happy Meal toys which really put the Australian ones to shame). Of course, you pay for the privilege.
• Not sure whether this is an idiosyncracy, or a result of extreme space-saving measures: The sinks and hand-dryers in McDonalds are sometimes combined into a funny hole-in-the-wall unit. It is activated by a motion detector (or, sometimes by three buttons, uhmmm??) and (give it 5 seconds) sprays your hand with a piddly stream of water for a bit, and then the blow-dry starts up. Hmmm.

• Okay so the chicken patty at Subways is much bigger, but pretty tasteless (dunno why);
• The Fanta is (sometimes?) more yellow here, post-mix and in cans (which, oddly, get imported from different Euro countries depending on the nationality of the cafe you're going to, I think);
• And the Macca's Apple Pie is a bit sweeter, but that's all.
• Oh and the menus are all the same as home at each chain, but they sell a variety of donuts at MacDonald's and Burger King.
• By the way, they use the same club stamps at Subways. Recommendation: Take your Australian ones with you, save £££!!

Then there's a restaurant chain known as Garfunkels, which does a very nice stuff-yourself-silly deal for £5 including one drink, in which you get to load your plate once at the salad bar (I think I managed to make the world's first "meat salad") and you get to pick any pasta dish or any of the 9-inch pizzas as part of the deal. Unfortunately, this is only a lunchtime offer, like Pizza Hut's one. Pizza Hut just isn't economical to do take-away (I don't really think I got any discount for doing the pick-up), no matter which way you do the sums (I had 15 minutes to mull this one over). You're better off getting a £1.50 shrinkwrapped pizza from Safeways. Now there is a pretty conspicuous shop in the Soho district which displays on human-sized banners "£3 Pizzas 11 inches" and "£1.50 Jacket Potatos 2 toppings". Good stuff. These prices are almost normal (to me!)

Spuds -- this must be the spud capital of the world. Except here they call them jacket potatoes, which is the real name after all. This has been an interesting way for me to get a good meal regularly, thank goodness. You'll find caravan-trailer outlets everywhere, and they'll be on the menus at almost every pub and cafe. Good thing.

• Remember to follow the bloody signs!! They've thoughtfully put yellow-on-black "Way Out" signs everywhere, even at the suburban outer stations. Watch out or you'll run in to a bunch of people filling the corridor going the other way. If you're particularly thick, you'll head out the wrong archway and be forever stuck on the wrong side of a handrail which separates the main corridor that leads from the barriers to the platform. They sometimes do that and I don't think they can make up their minds whether the people masses should travel on the right or on the left. I mean, the corridors end up at some escalators yet usually escalators are for travelling on the left one (and the centre one, if you're lucky). But when you're on the actual escalator, you have to stand to the right -- that convention is always followed, and I don't know how it started, but it's well-enforced, even when you get into a shopping mall.
• Prepare to lose all sense of orientation, all ye who enter here! Your tube map is your friend. You'll never figure out which way is north by the time you get to the surface because you've doubled back and turned around (and up and over) your tracks a few times as you negotiate the rabbit warrens under the city. Sometimes the tourists honestly feel like it's pointless to catch a train to a station and then have to walk for another 5 minutes in various opposite directions -- in fact, between Covent Garden and Leicester Square, you may as well walk the street. Or if you're at Bank and want to get to Monument, don't spend the next 10 minutes walking to "change platforms" -- you're better off going right round the end of the Circle Line to get somewhere close to the District + Circle Lines.
• Think of it in terms of Central station, with the "added afterwards" Eastern Suburbs line, and you'll get the idea how it is everywhere. Remember, Sydney is only about to get its first true "interchange" station around Tempe and the airport link where two lines actually cross and don't merge, and this is only the second time a tunnel has had to be made next to any one piece of track; but you get that all the time in London. For that reason, changing lines is often a lot of a bigger deal than it is in Sydney. Thankfully you'll have the assistance of escalators a lot of times ... er, unless you're unlucky and end up at one of the earliest tunnelled stations, where they force you all to share a big lift to get to the surface! Freaky! (I think that is the only place London actually uses the exact words, "Stand Clear -- Doors Closing").
• For that matter, all the lines are very distinctive and never seem to share stock (though I'm sure some could; they all use the same four-track electrification). You get your big ugly workhorses like District and Metropolitan which form the backbone of the city and were actually dug out of the ground over 100 years ago (and these two are linked by the temperamental Circle line on common track, plus former sections are now known as Hammersmith & City); and then you get the ridiculously small tube toy-trains which you feel like laughing at (because the windows in the doors bend with the curvature of the round roof -- you can get your head chopped off if you stand up straight where the doors are when they close), but then you stop when you notice how each carriage snugly fits exactly into the frigging "tube" tunnel as it escapes with a blaze of subterranian wind. Sheesh.
• So at least the midget tube trains (all of the Underground has only 6 carriages, so you'll get roughly half the capacity as a Sydney train, probably less) are almost all new and refurbished. Especially the Central (red) line trains, which are my favourite, which has red-painted handlebars in the same way some other lines have their colours, makes it look and feel like a big toy train. The Central line stock all have door-open buttons which actually need to be pushed to work (stops the cold coming in), and even has close buttons that work.
• What are the carriages like, especially the crappier District-line ones? Well, if you think of the old Red Rattlers that Sydney used to have until 1993, and imagine they were continually improved and refurbished, into deluxe versions, that's how they are now. The District line especially, hasn't had a refurbishment for a couple of decades now, and has all that groovy decor and wallpapering you expect from a 1970s kitchen. But you'll notice how all the trains there make the same engine groaning sounds as the Red Rattlers ... so I suppose Sydney used to have some English stock, for its locomotives? The nice new trains on the Jubilee lines though, do a wacky gearbox thing as they speed up and slow down, which gets some very musical wheezing at the platform.
• I suppose the trains accelerate and brake harder, but I'm sure they don't go nearly as fast ... travelling with a brick wall next to your face for over an hour will give the impression that you're moving faster.
• FYI, the District line is really two separate lines -- don't let them fool you with that Paddington spur that really goes down to Wimbledon. By rights, it should have a separate colour but, if you look carefully, they've run out of colours -- can you think of any more obvious colours that they haven't used already?
• Some of the more well-known stations have those platforms which go around a bend ... remember, the carriages are straight, so the gap gets bigger in places. It's at stations like this in particular, but all of them generally, where you hear the booming announcement (in crisp, clear tones): "MIND! the GAP. ... MIND! the GAP. ... MIND! the GAP." Phew, he's fin--"MIND! the GAP." He's finished.
• Most trains have groovy heating wafting up from under the seats. So no, it wasn't your breakfast.
• Charing Cross has to be the coldest station in the whole London Underground. Who knows why. Air conditioning on the blink or ghosts?
• When you see the word "Subway" glorifically portrayed on a metal sign (and a don't mean the sandwiches), and there are steps leading under the ground -- don't think New York Subway. It's just a pedestrian tunnel, as I know it.
• If you see the surface rail, you may notice the regional express services (not the normal out-of-town ones, but the ones which have their first stop 20 minutes away) go really fast. These use the "XPT" engine that New South Welshmen are familiar with, but, somehow, get them to go at a furious 180km/h or something. I'll never get bored of watching them fly past the platform -- which, by the way, has the yellow line painted at double the distance!
• I finally managed to catch one of these First Great Western Railway "fast trains", and of course, it didn't feel as fast when I travelled on it. Oh well! It was better than the boring Thames Trains anyway, which are kind of like single-carriage Tangaras (interior) that cruise lazily around the countryside with 2 or 4 carriages.
• Oh yes, then you have your "semi-fast" trains, which you can find on various outer tube-line services as they finally get the courage to skip stations. Something that Sydney does more often.
• But the flip side, I have to say, is fantastic. You get a train all the time, without waiting. They really don't have a timetable, but they just simply run one behind the other as much as possible. And you'd think they give up doing that after peak hours, but really, they get you where you're going with even less waiting time because the frequency is still just as good and they don't sit at stations so much (trying to squeeze people on and off). So, if you miss a train, don't stress!! Another one is always only a minute or two away.
• Oh yeah, you get those groovy "bum seats" if you're left standing (which is quite easy, since seats are generally so few to a carriage) and there's one near you. They're good for reading the paper.
• In fact, it's amazing how many people bother reading the paper in the morning on the tube. The papers here are really popular -- often you'll see people lining up at a newsagent, and grab two tabloids for good measure -- and they still have more publications than I can count, not having suffered any fit of amalgamation like Australia did a while ago. And the practice of buying an evening paper seems to have survived the 1990s very well here.
• The Piccadilly line is a very nice and fast way to get to Heathrow. The trains all have a nice generous space to stick your luggage, officially. So why, oh why, do they put such terrible barriers at the ticket barriers and just again before the platform entrance, just at Heathrow station?! They are deliberately trying to stop suitcases passing through. But why?! Isn't this discouraging the average traveller? It is truly nonsense. I mean, it only succeeded in making me slow down as I had to haul my bag over the silver bars by force. I suppose, maybe they only want briefcase-toting executives to use the tube, and for all the tourists to take the expensive flashy surface-rail service from Heathrow to Paddington.
• Speaking of which, there's a groovy airline check-in and everything at Paddington. You get actual BA staff manning the desks, and I think you can get most airlines checked in there, especially Club World partners. That's right, they take your luggage and everything; just hop on the express thingamy to the airport, board your plane, and don't worry about it.

The other factor with the cars here is probably the emphasis on making "small" cars (3 or 5 door) that people will be satisfied with. And you notice that the equivalent models to some of our Commodores (Vauxhall Carlton and Omega) and Falcons (Ford Granada), especially the rolling box which was our XD model of the early 80s, seems strangely subtler and not as bulky in England. I don't know what it is! It could be smaller dimensions or just a trick of the sculpting.

Television is also striding ahead in this country, right now -- which makes a change from the US jumping the gun. This is the only country which is actually selling digital receivers and widescreen-digital receivers to the consumer at any serious pace. Australia won't be far behind, since we'll be using the same DVB terestrial transmission system within 12 months. (Except Australia will have mandated HDTV transmission for 20 hours per week, not that that should affect the price of the receiver, but that's another story). You can sign up for a free reciver + subscription costs from a certain provider, who will give you a box that simply plugs into your aerial, no satellite or cable required. Although satellite and cable also have their own digital channels. But the government has told all the stations that they have to transmit wide screen digital by 2005, so all programs are going that way. The Bill has already. The BBC is now transmitting three or four new channels, and only on digital, so if you want to see them (and they're all included in the licence fee), then get a digital decoder or a digital receiver. Meantime, the BBC is on the verge of developing a digital TV detector ... to put in its detector vans! Yes, they still have TV licences -- I have a TV licence stamp booklet from the Post Office to prove it!

The wide-screen conversion is an interesting development in itself. You can see when a programme is going out digitally (ie, widescreen), when they put subtle black bars at the top and bottom of the picture. For instance, just before The Bill starts, the station ID will flick into wide-screen mode. Some of you may have noticed this already if you've seen BBC World on satellite in Australia. This is basically the 16:9 -> 4:3 conversion option of least impact, by doing the letterboxing to a very small degree and then hacking off bits from the sides (this is all for the analogue simulcast); eventually the TV directors and everybody can stop sorrying about "will it actually fit in the picture?" once analogue trasmissions cease. Unless they want to worry about American markets. Anyway, a curious side-benefit to this is the sharper picture you get out of the conversion process, apart from the superior quality of end-to-end digital production: Because the letterboxing involves a "zooming out" to fit more of the sides in, you get a nice oversampled image out of it. It sounds like no big deal until you see how it compares to the old bog-standard PAL cameras. Effectively, what you're getting here is slightly-HDTV for free: The extra definition comes in the form of additional image area on the sides, but in the name of getting it onto your 4:3 set, it becomes a higher vertical resolution. Apparent, I should say; it's the same sort of thing as you get when converting from PAL 625 -> NTSC 525. Except you don't get any weird side-effects when going from 16:9 625 -> 4:3 625 (using only around 550 lines or so), unless you see an image that was full of sharp horizontal stripes and they turn into anti-aliased moires. The only time this doesn't work as well, is when a widescreen programme needs to use 4:3 images for some reason (eg home video footage); they perform a bit of zoom and stretch on it, and the end result is a bit blurry, even when going back to a 4:3 TV.

Meantime, it's been fun getting to watch The Eddie & Rosie Show, er I mean, The Bill a whole two years ahead in the storyline ... or actually, it's a little bit of a worry at times. A few of the senior characters are just wrinklier and greyer on top; though Polly is actually looking better than she did in the 1998 episodes (showing at the moment in Australia). There's a few new faces on the scene who are just pretty generic, so I can't describe them here really, except maybe the new WPC with the Liverpool accent. The detective who took the bribe money in a 1997 episode (shown last year in Australia) is still there, and the plot just seems to be gaining momentum but that's because they had a small re-entry into it in a 1998 episode I saw last December, and then they covered it again in February 2000 ... nothing seems to have changed, except that the other detective seems to have sussed onto him long ago (by now) and they have both talked about it before. So there must be another episode where something goes down, he may even admit it off the record, but the other DI can't pin him on it. Anyway, generally, the plotlines have well and truly settled into their 50-minute format (which, with 2 commercial breaks, makes an exact hour), and are probably losing their pace compared to the 25-minute days.

Then again, perhaps just a whole decade of having this thrust in my ears has taken its effect? Ha, I bet going to the gym remains an eardrum-jarring experience.

Internet cafes here are few and far between ... the phenomenon that swept Sydney's haymarket district, where all the computer shops morphed into internet cafes, hasn't happened in many other places by the looks of it. There are a few tiny places all over London, and Cambridge and Oxford seem to have just one decent store each; they all close around 8pm and charge ridiculous "CHEAP!" rates of around 12p / min or 6p / min if you fill in their questionnaire. That translates to nearly $AUD10 per hour!

The one I'm going to most often here, belongs to the "easy" group of companies (think Virgin-esque), where everything is orange. Basically, what they've done, is kitted out 5 big buildings around London, put in rows and rows of veneer benches with 15" LCD monitors, installed some active-desktop software on Win95 that takes up a chunk of your screen permanently to tell you what your remaining time is, and done that with 2,500 PCs around London. (Basically you don't see the PCs, just the keyboard, mouse, audio in/out and a USB port on the veneer panel). There are 500 PCs in this store at Trafalgar Square alone; this kind of thing is something I haven't seen at home or in America (maybe I didn't look -- but then you can get free access if you try).

The rates are basically determined around £1; you get to deposit as many pounds onto your ticket as you like, but at any given time, it says on screen, "£1 buys you 50 mins" or "1 hour" or whatever. If you stay until 11pm or midnight, people have left the store and it goes all happy-hour, dropping to "£1 buys you 4 hours" ... heck that's nearly as cheap as the best Chinatown rate in Sydney ;)

As I type this, I have been mucking around with the yuppie-as-all-hell feature on the time-remaining bar, the coffee-cup icon. Basically, in the stores that contain a Nescafe Cafe, you can click on this icon to bring up a web page form that you fill in and submit for instant delivery of hot food and drink to your desk. But the bastard is broken at the moment. It was missing a Submit button, so rather than get up and walk the ten metres to the cafe counter, I saved the HTML file to the C: drive and typed in an HTML form element to make it work; stuck it into Netscape, but then it wouldn't submit because the URL was relative not absolute; so I fixed that, and everything worked fine. But my hot chocolate didn't come; they turned off their whole system tonight, boo :-]

One thing really sucks: The British keyboards. They've always had to rearrange the shift-3 key for the pound sign, but for some reason this involves putting the double-quote in the shift-2 position, putting the at-sign (argh) where shift-quote is, and creating a new hash-key next to the enter key, taking a chunk out of that one. Annoying. There's also an Alt Gr key where the second Alt key on the right of the spacebar usually is; and no, you can't use it for Alty types of things. Oh yes, shift-hash is now tilde, which means, what have they put on shift-backquote? The answer is the ¬ symbol, which seems to be saying "end of line, return" or something. What I found particularly depressing is that Mac keyboards have done exactly the same thing, when it would be perfectly easy just to use a US keyboard and type option-3 for the pound sign. Simple!

Things Which Cost The Same Pretty Much Everywhere (so convert to $AUD by multiplying by 2.5 and you're right)	Things Which Are Increased By the Big Mac Index (basically, you'll find that $USD and £UKP figures are the same)	Things Which Are Just Notoriously Expensive (the £UKP figure and $AUD are the same, effectively cost 2.5 as much!)
CDs, DVDs, videos, movie tickets, bargain-price food (Soho), discount international phone calls, Formula 1 hotels	McDonald's, KFC, Garfunkels, supermarket, drinks (post-mix, pubs and cans), bargain-price internet access, Portobello Road markets, books & magazines, white goods & brown goods, youth hostels, tourist attractions	Pub food, restaurants generally, Pizza Hut, Subway, London Underground tickets, intercity train tickets, petrol & diesel, haircuts(!), internet access, clothing, hotels, taxis

Note that some things are still worth getting because they were cheap in the first place: Pub food and supermarkets, for instance. It just means that Australians are probably getting away with far more than they realise. Even a full slug of a GST from 0% -> 10% (no previous wholesale tax) won't change the situation much.

Credit cards are accepted just about everywhere, as long as your transaction is over £5; the same as Sydney, really. The only exception I've encountered so far (oooh -- scary), is one store of Marks & Sparks, but I wasn't about to buy something anyway. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is running around like crazy every 3 days trying to find a Lloyd's bank or Bank of Scotland to redeem her travellers cheques; I find it much more convenient to simply use the ATMs ("cashpoints") as I would at home, and the ability to withdraw smaller amounts probably outweighs in terms of safety, the transaction cost of $1.50 I have to pay each time.

Taxis do a funny thing here (well they do a funny thing everywhere) of adding an "Extras" amount and slapping that on at the end; just when you thought a £5 note would do the trick for your 5 minute ride, it doesn't.

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